According to Sheldan Nidle, if you’re into Star Trek or The X-Files, chances are you’re an intergalactic being. As founder of one of many pseudoscientific New Age movements, Nidle and his Planetary Activation Organization believe themselves to be extra-terrestrials, sent from space to save the earth from imminent doom at the hands of human exploitation. These so-called “Starseeds” are among us to usher in the Golden Age of Gaia and carry humanity through to a fourth dimension, but not all are aware of their cosmic mission. On reincarnating into the human race, most Starseeds suffer amnesia regarding their previous lives across the “omniverse”and often need to go through a process of “awakening”.

The people most likely to possess this cosmic mutation in their DNA – which Nidle assures us can be proven by developments in quantum biology – tend to feel alienated by their human peers, believe they’ve been adopted by their parents and are pursued by the unshakeable feeling of a greater vocation. Telepathy, telekinesis and teleporting are some of their potential abilities and physical differences, such as an elongated neck and big eyes, are a dead giveaway.

Never mind that Nidle was awarded James Randi’s ‘Pigasus’ for “paranormal fraud”, after an unfortunate prediction that the world would end in 1996, nor that 2012 has, as yet, failed to yield the seismic shift in consciousness that the PAO promised. Because what’s interesting about the Starseed is that there appears to be a strong online network and a sound contextual reasoning behind its emergence that is one specifically of our time.

The people most likely to possess this cosmic mutation in their DNA tend to feel alienated by their human peers.

Sensitive to a bleak humanitarian present, a rhetoric of “acceleration” and an ideology of anti-xenophobic, spiritual globalism around it, the hope of the Starseeds’ cause is one of creating a single unifying experience. In the face of a fragmented subjectivity and compressed sense of time buoyed by post-internet culture, Starseeds appear to exist within a complex duality, where they both react against and integrate with the status quo of communication within their strong online presence. On a basic level, Nidle offers things like a one-hour long webinar, ‘Galactic Humans 101’, where he lists a detailed 5-step programme for “self-activation” as well as instructions on staying “current with the information on the PAO web site”. Golden Age of Gaia features ads for spiritual seminars, hyperlinks to things like InLight Radio’s “cosmic vision news” and references other web texts by the likes of SaLuSa of Sirius, Magenta Pixie and Archangel Michael (via Ronna Herman). “Licensed spiritual health coach” Fay Thompson guidelines on “coming out of the spiritual closet” for all Starseeds (whether Azez, Pleiadian, Arcturian or Sirian), while other YouTube-dwelling saviours anticipate the ‘Ascension’ around last year’s predicted Mayan cataclysm with ‘THINGS STAR SEEDS SAY’. A more polite spin on 2011 viral video ‘Shit Girls Say’, it features some fairly specific in-jokes surrounding the cosmic culture like, “you were so 3D when you were born your higher self smacked you” and “shift happens”.

But with no definitive text to draw from there are all sorts of web denominations with opposing ideas and philosophies surrounding said alien race – not least over whether to spell Starseed as two words or one. Even the spiritual alternative to Wikipedia, Spirit Wiki Starseed contradicts Sirius Ascension’s assertion that a typical Starseed can have lived five to 50 times on earth, an Old Soul hundreds, by defining it as a monadic spark that has only recently started inhabiting a human body “(i.e., within the last one or two lifetimes)”. But, perhaps, the confusion is a good thing because order creates doctrine and, when you consider that ancient Jesus Cult that became the global scourge of Christendom, dogma is a never a good thing.

As one ‘Charles Miller’ bemoans on the Intl. Starseed Network forum in 2010, there is a significant lack of a legitimate Wikipedia page on Starseeds, to which a certain ‘Xisque’ responds that the collaborative content management system “is one of the first places people look to get a great idea [for] some CSI-type TV monstrosity or a crazy slandering website”. That makes you wonder, what happens when crowd-sourced information portals like Wikipedia, or Spirit Wiki for that matter, become legitimised as self-evident truths? As we, the users, gorge on personalised content feeds and our own auto propaganda, one can’t help but think what our future reality will look like, while considering maybe that great shift in consciousness has already happened.